I am just another creature under the volcano. With me here are three million more of my fellows in a dense struggle with time and one another. This broken cone of a mountain in my line of sight sends up smoke, a pale wreath, to form the outline of a Mediterranean pine willowing up into disappearance. I’m thinking it’s a smoke signal from us all, send help.
Together with the sea the city goes in waves. It’s tumbles up hills, comes tumbling down them. Sea town volcano — rhythms, interstices, palpitations—there’s too much meaning in this landscape. It brings to my lazy mind a thought for life insurance. I don’t have any.
The sea is the Tyrrhenian. The city is Naples. The volcano is called Vesuvius. I am named Jonathan and I’m ultimately all that really matters, the only real meaning, my body, my beating heart, my working mind. Thoughts too of should I ever die without annuity, perish the thought, of my dear wife left to clean toilets, my children to wither without their Ivy League degrees.
The city spreads dense and low across the view from the hotel terrace. The view catches me and holds, lulls me into an even deeper reverie. I’m in its indolent sway, passive victim I, like so many countless travelers before me. Nothing new here. Nothing that hasn’t been seen, written about– nailed down in Christ’s palms leaving him helpless to save us– in merry song and dolorous poetry.
Even up here high on this veranda the city is a bubbling crater of activity, of noisy pursuits, somewhat irritating in its hectic going-ons that exclude me. To me the joy and fear in Naples is like that of New York’s. At least they feel familiar, seem similar. But Naples’s dread is more palpable than New York’s. Doom is in the inescapable volcano which all here live below.
Vesuvius is coming to take the city by sulfur and lava, by earthquake, by tsunami. The end arrives this afternoon or tomorrow. If not sometime soon at least in the time of inescapable-for-sure. It will catch and kill. Perhaps even me.
The sea, city, volcano are agonizing to me in their beauty. A sunshine morning on the Bay of Naples. Beauty made all the more striking by alarm.
I’ve finished my breakfast on the terrace of the hotel Il Paradiso, up high on the precipitous slope of Posillipo. This is an affluent quarter of Naples ennobled by villas. Resplendent in the morning, it’s a steep garden of the senses sizzling in full bloom. It also goes plummeting onto the rooftop tiles far below. This hotel is not for the acrophobic.
A slight breeze ruffles the pages of my guidebook. I’ve been making a mental note of which villas and places to visit in Pompeii, for the frescoes, for the plaster of Paris dead in their agonies, for the porn-then no different than porn-now, for the shit houses and the uneaten loaves of bread, for bathhouses and whore houses whose graffiti live on between our legs. These pressing matters of human experience.
My list in mind:
House of Neptune and Amphitrite
House of the Faun
Villa of Diomedes
House of the Vettii
Villa Of Mysteries
All my life it seems I’ve wanted to go stepping there, my feet shuffling soft and reverent. To focus my attention on every detail, sucking it up deep in my brain and gut, keep it safe for me alone, a long running video in my soul. For me today is a sacred day. At long last I’m going to Pompeii!
My trip today is not so simple, although only 15 miles. By memory I know I must walk from Il Paradiso for a few minutes to find the Funicular Station Manzoni. There to descend almost vertically between the tight cluster of villas.
At bottom of Posillipo I’m to change again at the Mergellina train station for the subway line to Piazza Garibaldi. There I must change once more, to the Cicumvesuviana train line from which I am to alight at Pompeii.
This routing is an etching in my head. When travelling short or long haul by foot I’ve learned not to make myself conspicuous by frequent recourse to maps and other guidance. Once the course is set in my head I follow it with the dedication of a greyhound.
One treacherous pride in me is for my innate sense of direction. I’m rarely lost. I can drive across New York, Rome, Paris without a map and rarely a wrong turn. It comes from being born on the high plains. No mountains in the way it is said. Everything there is a direction, west- south and so forth. Ask for something in a Wal-Mart in Hays, Kansas you can be told ‘it’s on the north wall, so go east then turn…”
My failsafe is the guidebook I’ll carry close as a bible or koran.
The Circumvesuviana is crowded this Saturday morning with locals heading out to somewhere or other for their weekly shopping. I marvel at how indifferent they are to the vision of a smoking, alive volcano hanging over their heads.
Vesuvius last erupted on 17 March, 1944 killing 27 and leaving 12,000 homeless. Tracking its periodic revivals through the ages it seems evident it is overdue to come bursting at any moment.
Already I’ve been fearing I’ve gotten onto the wrong train. We stop every minute. I’ve watched and it’s taken 45 minutes to go the 4 miles from Naples to its contiguous suburb of Portici.
Ah Portici. My ghost so often with me, that freaked out father of mine came through here himself. Dad again! He came to visit the Casa Materna an orphanage for children many of them maimed during the Allied bombings of Naples. There were close to 200 raids on the city leaving 25,000 civilians dead, and thousands more injured and crippled.
Casa Materna remained important to father. Back home in 1956 when I was seven he helped organize a tour in the States for the orphanage choir, bringing them to Wichita. Vivid in my mind because two teenage boys both disfigured by the bombings stayed in our home. At seven I was stunned on seeing that one boy had lost a hand. His arm ended in a purple gnarl. He growled when I stared.
When they discovered we had no recordings of Italian opera the boys in street English insisted on us visiting the best record store Wichita had to offer. They picked out three for us, which I still have, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Rigoletto.
We comrades in travel pass on after Portici—stops are Erculano, Torre del Greco, Torre d’Anunziata—fuck, there are no anunziatas to help me on this milk train to nowhere. I’m giving up and fish for my guidebook in my Euro Marché grocery bag.
No Guidebook! Calamitous. I’d been refusing to resort to it since leaving the Il Paradiso, placing pride in my famous internal compass above uncommon good sense. By now it’s been swiped by a hotel maid probably humming the Anvil chorus from Il Trovatore.
Oh look, look! A sun’s ray shines brighter in
my glass!
To work, to work
Ready, hammer
Who cheers up the gypsy’s days?
The gypsy lady!
Something claps its hands in my face. Oh no! What stop is this anyway? Have I missed Pompeii!. Was it the last one. No no the next one.
It’s right now I cry to myself, this is the sacre coeur. I spring up as the train comes to a languorous stop. I rush to make my exit. The Anvil chorus hi-de-hos in my head.
My life comes along held tightly by the cutout finger holds of my Euro Marché plastic sack. It’s a relic of Lavaur and home, of shopping for groceries our staff of life, kids clamoring for cookies, wife poking over everything. We have many of these bags at home. I always take a couple along on my business trips. Most precious.
The contents of my bag are my all, cored in the black leather passport-size wallet. Where photos of my cute boys live, my drivers license, all my credit cards, a hundred euros in bills and –and my American passport.
This is my fourth passport in five years. I’m keenly aware of it especially after the consulate in Milan informed me after the last one was stolen that if I ‘lost’ this latest replacement I would be subject to a Federal investigation. Interrogation? Waterboarding? Guantanamo?
First passport was lifted at the Fiera de Milano. By well dressed young ladies from Brazil. I was visiting a client’s booth, sitting safe in a business meeting. The ladies stepped in to say one had an emergency and needed the bathroom. I stood to direct her, good gentleman that mother taught me to be. The two women disappeared and when I looked round so had my briefcase. The Fiera de Milano police said they were gypsy prostitutes who worked the fair for their pimps taking wallets and such in their idle hours.
The second passport was taken in the Milan train station. When I rented a car. Not thinking I lay my wallet on the car hire counter. It went in a flash.
Third passport was also stolen in Milan. Again I was there for the fair. Town was packed. I found my reserved hotel had been given away, to a high bidder I’m sure and Italian. I tried maybe 100 hotels, all full. No where to lay my weary head. Nothing else but to go to the fair and plead my clients to help me, I knew they had inside tracks to hotels. One had one room left for desperate cases, but also advised that it was a bit dicey.
I took it. I understood what was meant by ‘dicey’ when I checked in at the rag tag place in a clammy quarter of Milano. I was given a towel and a bar of soap. The room had a bed and straight back chair. A sink. Toilet and shower down the hall. Men groaned loudly through the walls.
When I checked out it was a repetition, I lay my wallet on the front desk to pay. Gone in a sorrowful blink, fast as any trucker’s orgasm upstairs.
“Gypsies!” commented the Madame.
Through these thefts I’ve become well accustomed to dumb and evil Carabinieri.
I’m registering a mild worry that no one else comes with me from the train. That when it leaves I’m left alone on a very short and sinister platform. No genuine platform at all. No normal train station kiosk. No turnstile. No parking. No one in sight at all to ask for directions.
No stairs either at the end of the platform. I must jump down onto a rough path. Drop is no big deal, no more than two feet. Landing is onto a wild path that disappears into jungle banks of reeds that are taller than I.
This did not seem to be an entrance ever imagined by anyone to one of the world’s greatest archeological sites, a most superior theme park. I feel paranoia striking deep.
Why isn’t there even one? Surely Pompeii merits it, a signpost pointing me to rich Romans and catastrophe.
Instead I wander for a few minutes among the reeds, along the path that dwindled before me. Junk, detritus from another lost city, lies strewn among the reeds from an age of steel and motors. Mainly there are refrigerators and stoves although I do pass to my surprise an old stripped Fiat rusting on its rims.
Such as it is the path is all I have, so follow it I must. Even as I feel like bleating.
It takes me to a clearing. Four caravans are parked at angles. Such a forlorn gathering. An open fire burns. Children run in mud. No men here only women humped over chores their heads wrapped in scarves. They’re scolding whatever they see as distraught women do the world over. When I sidle in they vanish.
Except one who takes cautious steps my way.
“You are lost.” she states in English, not a question. Accent thick as the towering reeds choking in on our multicultural scene. Si signora. Say I.
“English?”
“No, American.” An unwise reply I fear.
“Good for you.” A sneer? “Keep going and don’t stop. Go fast. There will be a tall fence. Find the tear and go through.”
She glares me down hard as an obvious Gadjo. Then turns on her children, dogs, the world. Mondo Cane.
A business acquaintance of mine in Rome would take me to posh dinners whenever I was in town. He drove a Citroen XM, black, smoked glass, luxury on wheels. He drove it in sunglasses, even at night. I thought of him as the aging tobacco leaf king of Italy.
“Every few months it’s stolen and the company buys me a new one. Gypsies!” He remarks.
Once he invited me to his home, a luxury apartment to go with the car and in one of Rome’s primo residential quarters. It was he who’d given me advice on the Gypsies.
“The worst place is the Central Station. Avoid if possible. The gypsies teach their little girls to lift wallets. The Gypsies use them because they know a respectable man will hesitate to hit them. Take a rubber band and wrap it twice tightly around your wallet. That way they can’t take it.”
I tried the trick and it worked. When wrapped in elastic I myself had difficulty getting my wallet out of my breast pocket. He also warned me about the gangs of little girls snatching briefcases
Once, not long later, in daylight, in Piazza Cinquecentro, Roma Termini, I was suddenly encircled by gypsy girls, perhaps five or six, aged about 10, no tits. They went at me like a school of piranha, darting for me from every direction to pinch and push, small fingers like sharp teeth going for my wallet.
As my tobacco king advised I began to swing my brief case in a circle around me, knocking them away hard in the head. I’d ignored their child screams, fought the sense that I was abusing them. They broke away in a torrent of what I’m sure was the worst profanity their Roma tongue knew.
Dr. Emilio Lavazza talks to me in the heat of a September evening, from across our table for two in a prized restaurant in Turin. CEO and president of the Lavazza Coffee company Italy’s largest by far, one of the five largest roasting firms in Europe, among the top ten such companies in the world. He’s a man of great wealth and authority. Emilio’s regaling me with stories of his business dealings in Africa, particularly in Angola. On the last plane out of Luanda the rebels who’d taken the airport strafed the jet he rode with machine gun fire.
I like this man. He’s built like a peasant’s shit house, has a peasant moon face to suit.
It was an early driving trip for me all 500 miles from Lavaur to Turin. I took my new Peugeot sedan. Trunk was packed with my business supplies, mainly boxes of magazines and rate cards to leave at visits, my suitcase.
That night for my dinner with Emilio I’d been able to park on the well lit street in front of the restaurant, Corso Vittorio Emanuelle II. As usual in Italy a shady fellow appeared, the essential car-watching dude, his hand out for a few lire.
But when Dr. Lavazza and I come out, glowing in wine, Italian cuisine and stories, we see my car with the doors pried open, the trunk lid straight up in an erection. No car watcher in sight.
I saw the car first and gave a tragic groan, besting Verdi. Dr. Lavazza was busy sweeping his arm across the scene, “Turin is fabulous!” That perhaps a chamber of commerce cry.
It was an eerie scene with the man’s name in bloody neon letters twenty foot high above us—LAVAZZA– stunning the town from atop a neighboring building.
Nothing left in the trunk except the boxes of my magazine samples. Discriminating readers, those thieves. Aha, but that time they didn’t get me as I had prudently taken my wallet into the restaurant with me in case Emilo didn’t offer to pay.
“Gypsies!” opined the great coffee man. I pondered what would it be like to be so short and have one’s name screamed out loud in such a way above a great city?
Perplexing to foreigner me, such fuss made about the Roma in a land despoiled by Cosa Nostra,’Ndangheta, Camorra, Stidda, Sacra Corona Unita, the Foggiana.
I’m arrived where I want to be at last and from the beginning (world without end). Here, where Pompeii’s city wall has been exchanged by a weird magus for a chain link fence that stretches either way far beyond seeing, rising a couple of heads above mine meaning magically lifted higher than human thought.
The sons of my gypsy woman have been active. Up to my knee cap a three feet width of chain link is rolled back.
Someone, something, or both, I imagine is coming up the path behind me. I get down hastily on my stomach. I’m crawling forward, dirt in my mouth, jubilant in having ultimately outdistanced the Gods those tyrants who placed so many obstacles in my way of getting here.
Scrambling inside a steel tooth of fencing hooks my left pant leg. Rip. It slices an ‘L’ in the denim, L for leg or lost? That stings.
Never mind I’m in. Arrival is almost as sweet as departing. I look back at my progress. The garbage strewn expanse of fence undulates at me. Was it mockery? No just the wind fluttering the tatters of a hundred white plastic grocery bags snared on sharp mesh teeth. So many all just like the one in my grip, which I grip the tighter.
For sure this other side feels different, looks different, smells different Pompeii at last. Reminiscences on Gypsies fade, father and his mutilated orphans go too. La Traviata plays in my head with a skip on ‘Addio del Passato–farewell happy dreams of the past’, my golden boy infancy in Wichita, my pristine jeans, my guidebook with the page corner folded down where ‘Naples’ begins. Pompeii has me in its sway.
Images collide and pop away like grapes between thumb and forefinger. This sunny Vulcan land dissipates them even as it brings to mind others. What we want to see: bodies in plaster, jacking off or not (we all want them to be doing it), the shit houses, fucking raw brothels and all the wretched pornography, the brilliant frescoes over which I can coo ‘oh what genius’ along with all the others who’re chorusing ‘oh shit it’s just like us.’ And then the slaves. Those wretches owned like dogs. Another prurience for the mind of man to revel in.
The city spreads around in skeleton walls, fake Hollywood doorways and windows, rubble strewn and ashen. Reminds me of where I once lived in the ancient of days of my own life. A far away Lower East Side, Ninth Street between B and C, off Tompkins Square, where the landlords burned their own buildings, entire blocks, for the insurance money. Insurance. I walk amid a lot of nothing, nothing is rubble I guess. I’m wondering as I go along if life insurance premiums might be higher just on the other side of Vesuvius in the city of Naples so crowded and noisy, where you can’t take a loud shit without the neighbors smiling.
This place is striking mostly because it has no smells, not a whiff of human stink, no rich aroma of urine and shit, no unwashed hair, armpits, butt holes. The air is bereft of bacon and eggs. The tourists aimlessly stumbling about bring no life with them except to click their photos of nothing and chatter like idiots on parade.
I spot a fragment, one small cut stone. Figment of Steve Reeves posing his muscles through The Last Day of Pompeii. I drop it without shame into my Euro Marche bag.
I’m a spy imbedded into this group of visitors. Already I’ve trudged a fair amount of the dead city with them. Their leader is a priest. I think he’s fabulous. He could lead a mega church in Houston.
I’ll guess he’s a village priest from somewhere in the countryside near Naples. It’s a group of 20 or so, all women I note. All in black, black scarves on their heads, all holding rosaries. All are apparently lost in their fingering of beads, of their mutterings. It’s an endless rosary going through the four mysteries of Christ and interrupted by exactly 53 Hail Mary’s’.
Sometimes like at the moment, they erupt into song, a dirge from someplace impossible to find, probably a lullaby for the dead. The women range from emaciated to rosy, from middle age to old. This priest, their leader, is also in black, a neck to toes cassack bundling his portly figure into a burnt ham roast. He’s streaked in white to the knee from brushing through, over and kneeling onto the dusty rubble of pagans.
Now he’s again taking a knee while leading the women in a prayer. He’s done so several times as we wander the streets. Hands clasped he stares into the dusty photo-op sky with Vesuvius in the backdrop. For this he throes back his head so I see him often looking up from under his black flying saucer hat with its wide round brim. He’s got serious razor burn on an effeminate toadish throat.
I think the prayer he gives is the same at each of our stops. I’ve come to believe it’s the prayer to Our Lady Of The Rosary of Pompeii.
From the depths of my bitterness I have lifted up my voice to thee, O Queen of the Rosary of Pompeii, and I have felt the power of that title so dear to thee. Hail, I shall ever cry, hail to thee, thou Mother of pity, fathomless ocean of grace, sea of goodness and compassion!
The supplication includes singing by the women, a bone-rattling harangue at the heavens. For such a civilized nation Italy still knows the incredible primitive. Each woman fingers her rosary for tactile aid. Can there be something erotic there?
I’d joined this group after realizing what a standout illegal alien I am here having no ticket, which occasionally is demanded. This group, including unbeliever me, goes past that without a ‘Halt!’.
We are now standing in awed silence before a display of the twisted dead. Priest prays ardently. Women sing with more enthusiasm. This is the high point of their visit. I wish to laugh because it seems obscene.
The group has ditched me. On purpose I think. My identity is gone with them, I am again a nemo, a wanderer without a guidebook. Suggestive status for an outcaste. I see myself discovered, disguise ripped away. I’m going to get caught!
Afternoon slides into longer shadows. No matter I still have time for the Villa of Mysteries one of my ultimate concerns. Wandering wandering. That gypsy woman could so easily direct me if she were here by my side.
Then in a mini miracle I see a sign for it. In English no less. Shit does happen. The villa, what’s left of it, is right in front of me veiled in the mystery of its own dust.
Someone to my side is asking for my ticket. It’s a man in a uniform, a cap even. I think he’s a Sicilian impersonating a Neapolitan. He looks like the man who gives the weather report on Italian TV to an audience of one, alone me masturbating in any one of my one thousand and one hotel rooms.
I understand nothing he says, Italian gaining in excitement sentence by sentence. He glowers at me a hand gripping my upper arm. I’m pulled off to stand in judgment before a young woman who seems in charge.
“But you must have a ticket.” She is saying. “Everyone has a ticket!” She looks in my bag, confiscates my rock, castes me a look of contempt.
My desperate mouth is saying, “Strip me! You’ll see I don’t have one!”
“But everyone has one.”
“I don’t even know where I would get a ticket?”
“At the gate. No one comes in except by the gate.” I sure wish there was a knob for turning her off .
Young woman with a fat bottom, she is so excited. “Show me how you came in.” I bet she has a poster for the Titanic movie on her bedroom wall. DiCaprio and Winslet in a kiss as disaster looms for them in an iceberg rather than fire and brimstone.
So I lead them, our clutch of first responders, with only a few wrong turns to the tear in the fence. They stare at it. I think dumbfounded. Then they break into spiccato, turns into stoccato Italian, in dialect by the guard, in Florentine by the young woman who’s surely an archeology student sent here to recoup looted rocks. Is she regretting she didn’t strip-search me?
I’ve been marched to the train, so simple a way. In the end they’ve let me go, after having me buy a guidebook and a ticket. I’ve been put, my bag still in hand, on a train that the strident young woman says will stop at Mergellina.
First I must buy lots of bottled water. Tourism’s left me miserably parched.
Trip back, guzzling industrial water, I can’t escape a feeling of disappointment about my day. Pompeii now at end of my trip is just as vague as it was when I started out. Nothing learned, nothing gained. Something’s gone wrong.
By the time I’m arriving at Mergellina I sit pumping leg in urgent prayer, please don’t let me piss on the linoleum of this train car.
And that requisite brings me here now to stand in the station’s men’s room at a urinal, dick in hand head lowered to study it in reverence.
It’s a joyous boisterous room, ‘boy’-sterous in truth because although I am tightly attending to my business, I know in fact that this large basement toilet is crowded to beyond its capacity with the bodies of adolescents and young men. I’m the oldest fellow in here.
I’m taking my sweet time washing my hands, bent over the faucet so that looking up I can sneak peaks in the mirror of the room behind me. Most curious scene there, one to cause a Southern Baptist from Tennessee to shit himself. The men-slash-boys are taking off their clothes.
They go fast so that soon the throng are down to underpants. White briefs in varying stages of raggedness. They are lean, all of them, not a plump breast or thigh among them, lean verging on scrawny. Every belly button in sight protrudes. Skin ranges from pale to the natural tan of the mezzogiorno.
I’m wondering vaguely if they are a poor circus troupe, maybe jugglers and acrobats preparing to do street acts on a Saturday night in Naples.
They ignore me, if it weren’t for myself in the mirror along with them I could think I’d become invisible on my train ride back into the city.
If I catch an eye in the mirror there’s nothing furtive. Those eyes behind me are not even seeing me, locked on their own pursuits. Ancient Mediterranean eyes. I feel no threat here, none. The boys frolic while I age by the second. That’s a clip running in the mirror of a fresco come to life of young revelers in jubilant motion. Maybe I managed to successfully steal it back from Pompeii, a memory unconfiscated.
They seem for the most part to be good humored, some cavorting, others in loud banter their voices competing with Wilson Pickett, what’s now playing at full volume on a cassette tape deck. Some dance along.
I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour
That’s when my love come tumbling down
I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour
When there’s no one else around
Now they come crowding in on me, half a dozen shoving to get a glimpse of themselves in any spare few inches of the mirror. Grins, naked shoulders, nipples, even one of the protruding belly buttons somehow gets into the frame to urge me to take up less space, to hurry along.
They need the mirror I’m seeing for putting on their makeup. Lots of it. Too poor, too exiled to have anywhere else with mirrors. I understand. They are boys of the night.
Someone’s rewound ‘In The Midnight Hour’, it’s playing again. Life lives thick and heavy, sour and sweet, guided and unguided.
Quick check. Yes, I still have my passport.